In the ‘New World’ “deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.”
The organic nationalists such the young Austrians argued for an organic conception of the people and state. Conflict – be it conflict of interet or class conflict – was to be transcended, for the people are indivisible and united.
Thus “late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration. Jews took the brunt of the pressure
“During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims.”
Settlers and Their Victims
I note two persistent features of the colonial dark side. First, the settlers often enjoyed de facto local self-rule—whatever the constitution said. For the period, these were distinctly ‘democratic’ communities, yet their ethnic cleansing of the natives was usually worse than that committed by the colony’s less democratic imperial authorities. The Spanish, Portuguese and British Crowns, Viceroys and Governors, and the Catholic and some Protestant Churches, tended to be milder toward the natives than were the settlers themselves—which is why most Indians supported the British in the American Revolutionary War. Second, deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.
But let us also note that the native peoples’ own political institutions were usually far more democratic than the settlers’. Their indigenous forms of political participation were more ‘direct’ than representative, but the rights of the ordinary male members—sometimes also the females—of native tribes and nations were usually far greater than those of the citizens of representative liberal democracies. For example, they could freely leave the tribe or nation or they could refuse to fight for it. The ‘democratic peace’ school have excluded groups like the Indian nations from their calculations, on the somewhat dubious grounds that they did not have permanent, differentiated states of the ‘modern’ type. Though this is convenient for the self-congratulatory tone of much of their writings, it is illegitimate even by their own definitions. [My italics N.M.)
For Indian nations did develop permanent constitutional states through the mid-nineteenth century—for example, the Cherokee in 1827, the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creeks in the period 1856–1867. One of the causes was pressure from the US government for the formation of ‘responsible’ government with which it could negotiate.8 Predictably, the negotiations turned into wholesale expropriations and deportations, interspersed with genocidal outbursts. Thus liberal democracies were actually committing genocide against other democracies, repeatedly. If we counted up separately the cases where ‘the people’ of the United States, Canada and Australia committed mass murder on the individual Indian and aboriginal nations, we could probably tip Rummel’s statistical scales over to the conclusion that democratic régimes were more likely to commit genocide than were authoritarian ones. But I have no wish to reverse the statistical artefact, only to suggest a more limited sociological reality: that in colonial ‘dual’ societies, settler democracies were more likely to commit massive ethnic cleansing, sometimes amounting to genocide, against other democracies.
Was this a necessary connection between the two sides of liberal democracy, between genuine democracy and genocide? Not in one sense: the emergence of liberal-democratic régimes in the North-West European core did not depend on genocide in the colonial periphery. It was caused indigenously from within Europe. We are dealing with two separate phenomena. Yet there was another connection. Since the imperial authorities, especially those of Spain or Portugal, were not committed to rule ‘by the people’, they were less likely to develop theories emphasizing the racial (or other) commonality of all settlers. Yet, since settlers wished to legitimate rule by the ‘people’, while seeking to limit the people to Europeans, they were likely to develop the theory of ‘the people’ as ‘race’. This is the first sense in which genocide was the dark side of democracy.
All this runs flat contrary to Rummel’s ‘democratic peace’ explanation of genocide—at least in the early modern era. Only for the Europeans and then, much later, for the few indigenous survivors or the descendants of slaves, could America and Australasia be considered to have had liberal-democratic and generally non-murderous states. Ethnic cleansing, murderous, deporting, amounting at its worst to genocide, was central to the liberal modernity of the New World—committed first by the settler colonies then by the ‘first new nations’. The process continued in North America and Australia until there were virtually no more native peoples to exterminate. It was not a product of democracy per se, but a product of democracy amid colonial exploitation.
Organic Democracy Before 1915: The Dark Side as Dominant
If we contrast developments in the Centre, East and South-East of Europe with the North-West, we find three essential differences. These were the main causes of the dominance of organic rather than liberal conceptions of the nation-state. They quickly led to a dominant dark side and ultimately led to fascism. All three are also commonly found in the contemporary developing world. That is why both genocide and fascism may recur there.
Firstly, aspirations for democracy appeared later in these more backward countries. Thus, they emerged in an era in which the most ‘advanced’ political theory was of mature democracy, dominated by the notion that the whole people—in other words, the eighteenth-century British ‘people’ and ‘populace’—must rule. In the Centre, East and South, limited stratified franchises of the Anglo-American type were soon overwhelmed by more popular legitimations. Seeking nonetheless to keep the masses at bay, élites developed a different type of intermediary polity, less often limiting the franchise than the sovereignty of parliaments. All males might vote but their representatives had to share legislative power with a strong executive—usually a monarchy. The German Kaiserreich was the prototype: the Reichstag, a parliament elected by universal male suffrage, shared powers with the Kaiser and his ministers.
This meant that élites could use their powers within the state to manipulate and mobilize from above ‘the people’. Their capacity to do so was enhanced by the economic backwardness of most of the region. Here, ‘the people’ was still largely rural or in small artisanal or casual back-street employment, largely outside the reach of working-class organizations—Germany itself would not be an example of such backwardness. This has also been the case more recently through much of the world. Limited franchises in today’s ‘Southern’ countries of the world seem barely possible. Either everyone or no one has the vote—though the vote might be partly or largely phoney. By enhancing executive powers, this first difference thus enhanced statism beyond liberal levels.
Secondly, by now, all states were expected to do much more for their citizens: to provide infrastructures integrating their territories, to engage in mass mobilization warfare, to sponsor economic development and to organize social welfare. As Victor Perez-Diaz notes, the state became ‘the bearer of a moral project’.9 In the 1890s and 1900s, statist projects surged on the Far Right with the writings of proto-fascists like Barrès and Maurras, on the Centre-Right with Social Catholicism, and amid centre-leftists like the German ‘Socialists of the Chair’, British ‘New Liberals’, French Radical Republicans and Russian liberal zemstvo intelligentsia. The Left lagged behind. Until after First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, most socialists remained attached to utopian or communard notions of a minimal post-revolutionary state. In the twentieth century, the statist surge continued, affecting most countries of the world. Though slightly dented by the recent revival of neoliberalism, states in the ‘South’ have been expected to substantially co-ordinate social and economic development. They are statist.
Finally, the region was dominated by ‘multi-national’ dynastic Empires—Hapsburg, Romanov and Ottoman. Thus, entwined with the usual class conflicts, came imperial versus local conflicts. In the era of democracy, these conflicts moved from conflicts between élites to conflict between supposed national communities. Local élites claiming representative rights for themselves, faced with pressures from below, sought to mobilize the ‘whole’ people against the imperial enemy and its local clients.10 The imperialist Germans, Russians and Turks—and later the Hungarians—responded with their own ‘revisionist’ nationalisms. Croats, Ruthenes and others might resent past Bosnian/Turkish and present Serb domination, Romanians might resent Hungarians; Slovaks might resent Czechs, and almost everyone might resent the formerly dominant Germans and Russians. Jews, formerly clients of the imperial rulers, often an apparently privileged minority dominating trades, professions and higher education, were widely resented in newly-liberated nations.
Thus nationalism was enhanced beyond liberal levels. This also occurred in mid-twentieth-century resistance to colonialism: the ‘whole’ indigenous people was supposedly mobilized against the colonial exploiters and their clients.
The Birth of Organicism
From these two boosts to statism and one to nationalism developed—and continues to do so—the organic nation-state. I give one early example.11 In 1882, three young Austrian politicians propounded the ‘Linz Programme’ which was intended to found a new party, the Deutsche Volkspartei, the German People’s Party. The programme combined German nationalism, universal suffrage and progressive social legislation. It denounced equally liberalism, laissez-faire capitalism and Marxian socialism. The three men declared that, whereas liberals advocated a constitution enshrining the conflict of interests, they upheld the ‘substance’ of democracy. Their legitimacy, they said, was grounded in the unity of the people, ‘the good of all’, ‘the interests of the people’. The projected party never materialized. The three split and went off to found their own parties. Adler became a leader of the Social Democrats, Lüger founded the Christian Socialists and Schönerer founded what became the Pan-German Party—these were the three mass parties of inter-war Austria, and two of them generated mass fascist movements.
These young Austrians were endorsing an organic conception of the people and state. The people, they said, was one and indivisible, united, integral. Thus its state need not be grounded upon the institutionalization of conflict. One national movement could represent the people, ultimately transcending any conflict of interests between social groups. Class conflict and sectional interests were not to be compromised but transcended. As the twentieth century began, the notion emerged that the transcending agent might be the state.
Organicist conceptions had two obvious vices. First, they led toward authoritarian statism. Few single parties of the Left or the Right have been able to maintain internal party democracy. Without institutionalized competition within, single parties fall to élites and dictators. Who is to express the people’s supposedly singular essence? Given the real diversity of human communities, a state controlled by an élite or dictator can most easily claim to speak with a singular voice. Thus genuine organic democracy proved temporary, being in the long run self-contradictory. Second, organicism led toward the exclusion of minority communities and political opponents from full membership in the nation. These nationalists came to believe in: (i) a national essence, distinguishable from other national essences; (ii) their right to a state which would ultimately express this essence; (iii) their right to exclude ‘others’, with different essences, who would weaken the nation.
Thus late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration.12 Jews took the brunt of the pressure. Two and half million Eastern Jews responded by migrating westward in the decades before 1914. Russian pogroms were escalating to murderous cleansing. During 1881–1883, Jews were scapegoated for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Politicians and the press fanned the flames, and the Tsarist authorities seemed unwilling to intervene. Yet these were mainly outbursts from below, especially from young male industrial workers displacing labour unrest onto Jews.13 Thus there were far more beatings, rapes and lootings than premeditated murders. The next Russian eruption was more political and so more murderous. It came in 1903–1906, fanned by the war with Japan and the 1905 revolution. Small-scale pogroms grew as discontent against conscription was displaced onto the Jews. They became more deadly when Jews were attacked as supposed ‘socialists’ by counter-revolutionary mobs egged on by conservative politicians. The Tsarist government was ambivalent, alarmed by the scale of the violence—3,000 Jews died—yet recognizing that pogroms could be used to whip up popular rightist support. During this period, political Zionism, the goal of a homeland in Palestine, spread among Jews as a pressured ‘exit’ option, secular and leftist in tone. Indeed, since they were increasingly attacked by rightists, Jews who sought to remain also turned further to the Left, further inciting rightist nationalists.
But it was not just Jews. During this same period, over five million non-Jewish East Europeans were also emigrating from areas where they constituted minorities—especially Slovaks, Croats, Germans and Slovenes. During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims. The final chapter came in the Balkan Wars from 1912 which led to half a million Christian Ottoman subjects fleeing northward, and perhaps a similar number of Muslims fleeing south, both fearing reprisals for being identified with the wartime enemy. Organic nationalism, accompanied by increasing statism, were intensifying. But the Great War took it into actual genocide—in which these refugees played a disproportionate role.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing, NLR, May/June 1999
Notes
8. D. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments under the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw and the Creek, Stanford 1992.
9 V. Perez Diaz, The Return of Civil Society. Cambridge, MA 1993.
10 See M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Vol. II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914, Cambridge, MA 1993, ch. 10.
11 Drawn from E. Schmidt-Hartmann, ‘People’s Democracy: The Emergence of a Czech Political Concept in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in East European History, edited by S.J. Kirchbaum, Columbus 1988 –she also instances a very similar movement among Czech politicians of the following decade.
12 Most of my figures on emigrations are drawn from R. Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe, 1848–1945, London 1983 and M. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, Oxford 1985.
13 J. Klier, ‘Unravelling of the Conspiracy Theory: A New Look at the Pogroms’, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 23, 1993, pp. 78–89.
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